Coello and Tapia, Chingotto and Galan, but that’s not all. Today’s champions are coming to Milan, but so are tomorrow’s. Specifically, they are arriving on a plane from Tarragona, the closest airport to Reus, where the FIP Junior World Cup, a youth world championship with over 600 athletes from 35 countries, was held until Saturday evening. Just two days ago, Francisco “Curro” Cabeza, paired with fellow Golden Boy Coquito Zamora, gave Spain the decisive point for the Junior World title, but the beauty (or ugliness) of racket sports is that you have to immediately turn your attention to the following week: so Curro, who will turn 18 in December and won his first Premier title in Gijon in early 2025, took off his medal and put it in his suitcase, thinking about his debut in the Oysho Milano Premier Padel P1 alongside Teo Zapata, against Pol Hernandez and Guille Collado. On the other side of the net will be one of the young players who impressed most a year ago at the Allianz Cloud: paired with Rama Valenzuela (now with Fede Mouriño), Pol gave Chingotto and Galan a hard time in the round of 16, losing 7-6 7-5 but to the standing ovation of the Allianz Cloud crowd.
Curro, Pol, and many others. In Milan, as already happened in Dusseldorf and Rotterdam, Tino Libaak will be back on court: a player who, a year ago at this time, gave Argentina the world title in Doha. Sidelined for four months with a lower back injury, Tino will team up with Jairo Bautista to form one of the new pairs for this final part of the season, eager to make up for lost time. The draw has produced a fascinating pairing: if Libaak/Bautista qualify, they could face the other young Argentine with whom Libaak made his breakthrough. That player is Leo Augsburger, who started the season with Pablo Cardona before joining forces with the experienced Martin Di Nenno, with whom he won the P1 in Madrid.
Juani Rubini, an Argentine born in 2006, has already won his first match in Milan and will face another “Next Gen” player, Javi Leal (born in 2003), who this year reached the semi-finals of the Rome Major with his peer Fran Guerrero and who is playing in Milan with Lucas Bergamini, also fresh from a change of partner and who reached an incredible final at the Allianz Cloud in 2022. Guerrero, like Leal, will also try to take advantage of his partner’s feeling with Italy, as he will be joined by Momo Gonzalez, who reached the semi-finals here a year ago and won a FIP Platinum and the European Championships with the Spanish national team in Cagliari. Talent, lots of talent, not only the best world players.